Shadyside Connector: Introduction

Street planning at the local level.

I recently had the great joy of participating in the civil engagement process at the Shadyside Connector virtual meeting hosted by the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure. The video of the night’s meeting can be found here and the slides can be found here.

This meeting, and the project that is its focus, captures so many different aspects of what the planning process looks like, from the high level concept, to on the ground data collection, public engagement, comment periods and so on, that I thought it offered the perfect opportunity to give a “real-world” application for many of the statistical ideas that are also discussed on this blog. This project is currently ongoing, so there will be more to write about as time goes on. For now we’ll focus on the background leading up to this meeting, the proposed changes to the neighborhood’s streets and the plan for implementing these changes in the years to come.

Figure 1: Proposed Bike Network from Pittsburgh’s Bike+ Plan. Figure taken from pittsburghpa.gov

Overview

This meeting comes amid a larger effort by the city to expand and improve the city bike network’s¹ access and safety. The high level overview of this plan is contained in the city’s Bike+ Plan (See Figure 1) which provides a long term vision of how the city hopes to expand the bike network. This meeting specifically focused on the “Neighborhood Connector” connecting the East Liberty and Shadyside neighborhoods. While several different routes were considered for this “Connector”, survey results pointed to Ellsworth Avenue as the preferred target for improving cycling safety.

The city of Pittsburgh also recently announced a 50 year mobility plan which includes all sorts of eyebrow raising ideas like gondolas, hyperloops, and good’ol fashioned bike lanes.

Figure 2: Shadyside neighborhood and Ellsworth Street. Neighborhood highlighted in grey, street in blue. Data from wprdc.org

Goals and Plan

The goals for the connector plan are as follows (taken from their slides):

• Improve bike mobility and comfort
  • Car Speeds < 25mph
  • Vehicle Volumes < 3000
• Improves pedestrian comfort
  • Crossing Improvements
• Supports and enhances transit access and comfort
  • Prioritizes pedestrian movements
  • Supports transit movements
• Reduces amount and severity of crashes
  • Increases safety for all users including motorists
  • Maintains vehicular access and parking

While these goals aren’t quite as quantitative as a statistician would like, they still speak to values many members of the community share — an important feature in all political discussions.

Figure 3: Traffic and accidents on Ellsworth Ave. Traffic counts from 2021, injuries from 2018-2019. Posted speed limit on this street is 25 miles per hour.

The proposed “treatments”² consist of a number of street shape alterations ranging from “rounding out” the corners at stop signs (See Figure 4), adding “chokers” or street narrowing concrete planters and roundabouts. The last of these recognize the realities of how cars and bikes actually use stop signs — they don’t. Whether these various treatments are sufficient to reach the goals listed above is debatable and several of the questions aired at the end of the meeting highlighted this point, while still appreciating the approach the city’s engineering team was taking: flexible at the beginning, committing to more long term infrastructure changes after initial evaluation.

Figure 4: Example Treatment used to ‘round out’ Stop Sign areas. Figure taken meeting slides linked above.

What Lies Ahead?

I enjoyed this meeting and plan to return to this topic again in the weeks and months to come, both to provide a perspective in evaluating the proposed treatments — pending data access — and to discuss the various social and political dynamics that undercut these meetings.

While I’m very happy to say that the meeting was conducted in a friendly and civil manner, due in no small part to the professionalism of the Dept. of Mobility and Infrastructure, MoveForward, and BikePGH staff, there were several issues that predominate here and across the U.S. that raised their heads at this meeting, warning of potential conflict to come. These included (1) The issue of parking and whether more or less space should be given to parking, (2) how space for cyclists should be prioritized relative to cars, and (3) the rate of progress in developing these, largely bike-friendly plans, relative to car street development. Many of these spoke to a generational gap — I recall hearing frustration on the part of the younger people on the call that the progress of bike friendly infrastructure wasn’t happening quickly enough and concern on the part of older individuals at to what exactly might happen and how it might affect their parking. Though I also think it is fair to say that even amidst their concern or impatience, everyone was generally very supportive.

Whether young or old, everyone deserves to use streets safely and I am excited to see how the community works together as this project progresses.

Disclaimer

I live near Shadyside and bike in this neighborhood and on Ellsworth regularly. While I’d like to think I can still offer a dispassionate view of this topic, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this very important point to you, dear reader, so that you might judge my opinions accordingly.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert Svoboda for reading and offering comments on this article.

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1. An all encompassing term, including dedicated bike lanes as well as streets without dedicated lanes where cyclists feel safe riding↩︎

2. A term I love for framing traffic, accidents, etc. as public health ills.↩︎